Selection Day

Picador

Synopsis

Selection Day is a captivating, witty novel by the Man Booker Prize winning author of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga.

'The most exciting novelist writing in English today' A. N. Wilson

One of the New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2017"

Manjunath Kumar is fourteen. He knows he is good at cricket - if not as good as his elder brother Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling and is fascinated by the world of CSI and by curious and interesting scientific facts. But there are many things, about himself and about the world, that he doesn't know . . . Sometimes it seems as though everyone around him has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself.

When Manju begins to get to know Radha's great rival, a boy as privileged and confident as Manju is not, everything in Manju's world begins to change and he is faced with decisions that will challenge both his sense of self and of the world around him . . .

In the media

Selection Day is at its heart an engrossing and nuanced coming-of-age-novel . . . intriguing and subtly developed . . . [Adiga] has succeeded in composing a powerful individual story that, at the same time, does justice to life's (and India's) great indeterminacies.

Sunday Times

[A] finely told, often moving, and intelligent novel . . . Adiga's novel takes in class, religion and sexuality - all issues that disrupt the dream of a sport that cares for nothing but talent and temperament. Because Adiga is a novelist, and one who has grown in his art since his Booker prizewinning debut, The White Tiger, he knows how to talk about all these matters through his characters and their compelling stories.

Kamila Shamsie Guardian

[Adiga] has always been drawn to that gap between the glitter and gleam of India Shining and the violence, inequality and social misery that give a partial lie to the nation's desire to rebrand itself . . . [he] has written another snarling, witty state-of-the-nation address about a country in thrall to values that 19th-century moralists would have damned as "not cricket".